Intuition for Simulated Annealing - <AUTHOR> http://rs.io/2014/02/16/simulated-annealing-intuition.html <comment><USER2> I first read about simulated annealing more than thirty years ago.

It's a fascinating approach. The analogy to physics is especially fascinating. I have only kept up with the literature, not seriously implemented it, so I could be wrong. But what I understand is that while simulated annealing is good for many things, it hasn't shown itself to be best for anything and the improvements on it have tended to changes that weakened the analogy with physics [1]. I find this disappointing since in its raw form, simulated annealing suggested a sort of "physics of information processing" mapping hard computation problems to states of matter. But it seems like analogies may be as misleading as they are productive sometimes.

[1] for example traveling salesman, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem), the first problem I saw simulated annealing applied to [in a reprint someone tossed out in Evans Hall at UCB circa 1981].

<comment><USER3> > But what I understand is that while simulated annealing is good for many > things, it hasn't shown itself to be best for anything

That's kind of the nature of the beast, though. Approaches like Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms are appropriate for situations in which you have no good heuristic for pruning a search tree. They're almost always going to be last resort approaches, but at least in the case of SA they generally approximate quickly enough to provide useful results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To explain simulated annealing to lay audiences, I rely on a similar (inverted) example. You're at the top of the mountain. You want to find the lowest spot. If you just keep walking downhill only, you may reach the sea eventually. But you may never reach Death Valley (86m below sea level) unless you are willing to climb some mountains at the beginning of your trip. IOW you need to accept sub-optimal moves (with decreasing probability) in order to adequately explore your surroundings.

<comment><USER5> Why not monte carlo your way?

<comment><USER6> When the solution space is very large Monte Carlo may not get you anywhere useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fewer pretty pictures, but much funnier and describing several different optimization algorithms (in the context of neural network training, but most of it doesn't depend on that): "Kangaroos and training neural networks".

ftp://ftp.sas.com/pub/neural/kangaroos.txt

</comment><comment><USER8> unless the global maximum is much higher, how much can be benefit from moving from the local max ?

in some way shape or form, I hear argument over and over - and from intelligent people.

We see this kind of risk-averse behavior in social situations where nobody wants to take the "hit" of moving from their current strategy.

or there many have been a time, when we identified the maximum and the entire landscape has changed around them, so the strategy is no longer optimal. this is another real situation.

also, "simulated annealing" seems to be a bit of a misnomer for this type of mixed strategy.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think 'shaking the box' is more akin to random restart hill-climbing.

<comment><USER10> You're shaking it too hard. You want to give it percussive maintenance, not kick it down a flight of stairs.</comment></comment>


Trolls drive Anita Sarkeesian out of her house to prove misogyny doesn't exist - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/27/6075179/anita-sarkeesian-says-she-was-driven-out-of-house-by-threats

<comment><USER2> As a gamer it's difficult to understand how people can't see what's wrong with journalists giving her attention for playing the victim. She is a troll of the worst kind, are we supposed to join her??

<comment><USER3> I think you're confused about what "playing the victim" means. When a man says he had to hit his wife because she wouldn't stop nagging him, that's playing the victim. When a woman contacts the police after receiving death threats, that's responding to a threat appropriately.

<comment><USER2> What is it if a woman says she is receiving threats just for attention and never informs the police?? Is that playing the victim? I shouldn't known there'd be plenty of white knights here.

<comment><USER3> I sure you have used the Internet often enough to know people can move to threats pretty quickly. I have already seen plenty of open threats to her, so arguing that nobody has threatened her can only mean you haven't seen it yet or you believe the threats only started after she claimed to be threatened. Even in that case, it proves her point. Responses I've seen from others say threats are extremely common, especially for people who comment on social issues.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stanford never promised not to use Google money for privacy research - <AUTHOR> https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2014/09/stanford-research-independent

<comment><USER2> This post was killed by user flags while the URL was [http://www.propublica.org/article/stanford-promises-not- to-u...](http://www.propublica.org/article/stanford-promises-not-to-use- google-money-for-privacy-research), presumably because that article is inaccurate.

We've switched to the url that appears most accurate. If there's a better article, we can switch it again.

</comment><comment><USER3> Publicity stunts get in the way of actual progress. Money is fungible so it's impossible to actually hold true to that promise. They could only use google money to buy sandwiches. But then money that used to go towards sandwiches can now be put towards privacy.

</comment><comment><USER4> Who cares? Depending how it is managed, this is a smart move. Accept money from anti-privacy advocates, put it in demilitarization researches. Then, accept money from anti-demilitarization advocates, put it in privacy research.

But perhaps I'm too optimist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Stanford I'm not too concerned about. The fact that Google is taking such a negative stance on privacy is quite concerning, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can we now finally acknowledge that Google has an anti-privacy agenda?

<comment><USER6> ????

When you file amicus/other briefs in federal court, you are often _required_ to state whether or not you have a financial interest in the case or receive funding from the parties/etc.

Stanford filed a proposal in a case that involved Google. In order to fulfill the above requirement, they made a statement that while Google gives them money, they didn't use it for the stuff they are talking about in the brief. They then conclude "For these reasons, we do not believe we have a conflict of interest with either Google or with the Plaintiff class."

That's it.

Blogger then decides this is a request by Google, rather than a fucking statement of financial interest.

The only agenda here is yours :)

<comment><USER5> "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."

But, fair enough about the original article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Apparently that report is inaccurate: [https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2014/09/stanford- research...](https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2014/09/stanford-research- independent)

Edit: not sure exactly why my comment was downvoted, the link I submitted is the response from Stanford CIS (the party who filed the legal document in question) disputing the article.

<comment><USER8> Odd how the most important comment on the thread, which debunks the source article decisively, can somehow be at the bottom of the thread.

<comment><USER9> It happens every now and then; that's why I have a habit of scrolling through the entire thread, including skimming the greyed-out posts.</comment></comment></comment>


The Kamcord Story - Getting into Y Combinator [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2R3nzHLc7Q

<comment><USER2> I always love hearing the "getting into YC" stories. It's great to see that a lot of it has to do with determination and clever thinking, over having a lengthy "business plan".</comment>


Future of data driven decisions based human intelligence platform: COGIXO.COM - <AUTHOR>

The future of data driven decisions based human intelligence, socially interactive, online & offline dating platform is here.
Cogxio™ is a new way to let you discover like-minded people of your interest around you in real time. The only Real Time Indian Social Dating App app in the world that gives you access to 'Real People' and Help you find 'Real Love'. Feel Love "On the Go". Forget Tinder Waiting, Connect with real people instantly, interact, share and plan for meet. <comment><AUTHOR> Download app here: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cogxio.aga...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cogxio.agape)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Watch youtube official video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGY47C575NM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGY47C575NM)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can see angle profile as well here: [https://angel.co/cogxio](https://angel.co/cogxio)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Watch video here: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cogxio.agape</comment>


The CIA made a Magic: The Gathering-style card game for training agents - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/21/17374054/cia-collect-it-all-declassified-training-tabletop-card-game <comment><USER2> This doesn't look like Magic: The Gathering at all. More like a board game that uses cards.

<comment><USER3> I was also kind of surprised at the reference to Love Letter as a card game that has a lot of replay value.

<comment><USER4> My coworkers and I used to regularly play Coup or Love Letter for a few months on our lunch breaks. I suppose it's not quite as replayable as Coup but we still did keep playing it over that span. I suppose if we had more selection of card games we would've moved on.

<comment><USER3> > I suppose if we had more selection of card games we would've moved on.

This was the case for me. I keep LL in my bag, because it is quick, easy, and a great way to kill 20 minutes. Coup hasn't worked well with my friend group because we got good at reading one another.

<comment><USER5> In my experience this is _precisely_ when social deduction games go from good to great. The layers of obfuscation can get pretty deep when your friend knows you know how he would act if you knew what he knew.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Techdirt is running a Kickstarter campaign for a version of the game that they're developing: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmasnick/cia- collect-it...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mmasnick/cia-collect-it- all)

<comment><USER7> The most recent episode of the Techdirt podcast discusses how the project started and gives some ideas about how they've approched it and how it works.

<comment><USER8> Link for reference: [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180518/22191239865/techd...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180518/22191239865/techdirt- podcast-episode-167-cia-collect-it-all.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This looks more like Munchkin. Players who are ostensibly on the same "team" actually spend most of their time trying to undermine each other in the name of getting more successes than their peers.

<comment><USER10> If you listen to the latest Techdirt podcast where they discuss this game, they actually talk about exactly that: that the game feels somewhat inspired by Munchkin, even if it's not explicitly cited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The CIA also has a board game focused on the Mafia and Cartels where you capture "El Chapo".

[https://kotaku.com/the-cia-made-a-board-game-and-its-now- pla...](https://kotaku.com/the-cia-made-a-board-game-and-its-now- playable-1825556825)

<comment><USER12> Sequel title

"El Chapo: Escape from NY"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ok now I feel like designing a scenario which includes a CIA card game mastermind. Now retired and living in an obscure villa...with a safe containing the unreleased beta for game version two, "nanobot edition"...

</comment><comment><USER14> Doesn't seem particularly true to life. Where are the cards for kidnapping innocent people off the streets, keeping them locked in secret prisons, pulverizing their internal organs and torturing them to death?

<comment><USER10> How do we know that's not in there? After all, they said lots of the original cards were redacted...

<comment><USER14> Good point! Hopefully the Kickstarter crew will incorporate the "incinerate whole families based on probabilistic guesswork" card in the public release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know whether this game is intended to be a recruiting campaign, but if it is it seems like a pretty clever one.

</comment><comment><USER16> CIA should pivot into making games.

<comment><USER17> oh they have.. bwhahaha!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of the Illuminati Card Game.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wish uninformed journalists could be bothered to get the terminology right.

A CIA "agent" is a foreign national — a spy. A CIA officer is the American who is "running" the agent.

FBI has Special Agents, CIA has officers.

It's much like calling a police officer a "police agent." The reason this bothers me is that it reveals an ignorance of CIA at a fundamental level — if writers can't even get the basic terminology accurate, how could they possibly be trusted to get the non-trivial aspects correct?

<comment><USER20> The dictionary definition of "agent" is "a person who acts on behalf of another person or group." Industry terms of art notwithstanding, anyone acting on the CIA's behalf is technically an "agent", in the same way that an employee is an agent of their employer. Similarly, it also means that LEO are agents of their force, if not the government.

<comment><USER21> Also, it's not a difficult logic leap to call members of the Agency "agents".

<comment><USER22> Although that would make members of the FBI bureaucrats.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Do Couples Divide Their Money? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/couples-and-money-11092010/ <comment><USER2> _66% of couples pool their resources and expenses, while the other 34% divide their bills equally each month._

I'm not sure this should make an entire 100%. My wife and I do not pool our resources and expenses, but nor do we divide our bills equally (I pay for 90%+ of them).

The 6 month "emergency fund" advice only comes third in the list but I'd put it at #1 with a bullet. If you can maintain _that_ , even if you screw up your budget or spend frivolously, you've got an important safety device to keep your back.

I'm also surprised that _"designate the most financially knowledgeable spouse as the financial decision maker"_ only comes in as advice from 3% of couples. Every couple I know in real life and have discussed finances with has one of the couple handle 90% of financial decisions due to a lack of knowledge/interest from the other party. I think it's great advice, too. Stick to what you're good at - that's why I don't do the cooking.</comment>


The age of 'pre-crime' has arrived - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/12/01/the-age-of-pre-crime-has-arrived/ <comment><USER2> Well if the purpose is to drum up enough public support to rid ourselves of license plate cameras then they are on the right track. It would do a number of the delivery business persons as well as those providing other legitimate services using their own vehicles.</comment>


Why a South Indian city's water crisis should worry you - <AUTHOR> https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/why-chennais-water-crisis-should-worry-you/articleshow/69885986.cms <comment><AUTHOR> I'm from a neighbouring state and this is indeed no longer an abstraction. A canary in the coal-mine if ever there was one.</comment>


Paris Metro lines on a Git graph - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vbarbaresi/MetroGit <comment><USER2> Similar idea for DC Metro here: [https://github.com/bburky/git-dc- metro](https://github.com/bburky/git-dc-metro)

<comment><USER3> Yep, that's mine.

Actually, it was you Christian, who was describing the git graphs as train tracks and prompted me to do this.

vbarbaresi, you should include the script or whatever method you used to generate the metro. I noticed you also used --allow-empty.

<comment><USER4> I would like to read that article, comment whatever about git and graphs

<comment><USER2> Oh. It was an in-person conversation, or possibly a Facebook message that @bburky and I had at some point. Let me see if I can dig it up, but I think it was pretty much just a screenshot of gitk on a particularly complex graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I had to remove some interconnections, because there were some cycles.

Because git doesn't allow cycles? Then as cool as this is (and it's very cool), perhaps this isn't an appropriate tool for this purpose.

Or might the natural, human-built cycles be expressable as subrepositories?

<comment><USER6> > perhaps this isn't an appropriate tool for this purpose

Would Mercurial be more appropriate, or do you think DVCS are simply not an ideal way of mapping metro lines?

<comment><USER5> In response to your siblings, I think this use of git is delightful, and I don't want to take away from that. I _love_ that people _play_ with these tools.

As to Mercurial being better, I don't know but I doubt it.

My comment isn't even really directed at the appropriateness of DVCS specifically. It's just a general observation of using an acyclic tool to describe a network with cycles. We do that a lot, sometimes for play, sometimes for practicality, and sometimes because we just flip the fuckit bit. [http://thechive.com/2009/11/11/there-i-fixed- it-23-photos/](http://thechive.com/2009/11/11/there-i-fixed-it-23-photos/)

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure scrollaway's comment is sarcastic :D

<comment><USER6> quite :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very cool! Git really clicked for me when I realized it was just a set of programs for manipulating a directed graph.

Can't wait to see the pull requests:

        Pull request 1: Direct route from my flat to work

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool stuff! I'm wondering: are there other fun things people have done with Git repositories? Things that come to mind are:

\- Family trees, genealogy

\- Electrical circuit schematics

\- Storylines for books, movies, RPG

\- Accounting, ledgers

\- Jurisprudence

etc.

<comment><USER10> The gitcoin challenge in the stripe CTF was pretty cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great idea (as a concept)!

But I guess finding connections and directions is a bit complicated (because after all the commits form a directed graph, as opposed to a subway map)

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems that, apart from gitk, there are some tools built for displaying git commit graphs. [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057564/pretty-git- branch...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057564/pretty-git-branch- graphs) In terms of the final use of this I haven't digged enough yet. What seems pretty straight forward is the potential of directed graphs for dashboard graphic interfaces. If you could export the git data to JSON, it shouldn't be very difficult to implement with D3 the dinamic generation of SVG's views. This way you might have a chance of making the graph interactive. Example: you could click on a node to retrieve the complete data contained in it, highlight a branch... Otherwise the graph might end not being very usable in terms of information organization or retrieval. However I'm very much for making cool things and not caring too much about usefulness. This is already a cool thing, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is pretty cool. Does anyone think this would work well for some network topology mapping?

</comment><comment><USER14> 42 commits. Well done :)

<comment><USER15> On master.. There are 300 stops, so you'll need at least that many commits. There's different branches for different lines.

<comment><USER16> Shouldn't that be "maître"? ;)

<comment><USER17> You can be sure it's not Imperial

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If I could cache the page I wouldn't need a metro app anymore.

</comment><comment><USER19> Attention à la marche en descendant du train!

</comment><comment><USER20> You could do the same for Rome in no time.

</comment><comment><USER21> Was any tooling built to help doing this?</comment>


React, Facebook, and the Revokable Patent License. Why It's a Paper Tiger. - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/react-facebook-and-the-revokable-patent-license-why-its-a-paper-25c40c50b562 <comment><USER2> If it's a paper tiger then why are legal teams blocking teams from adopting it?

There's the theoretical risk of patent infringement that this post addresses, but the more important point (imo) is that the current state of affairs is stopping React adoption for teams that, without the input from their careful lawyers, would gladly adopt it. Or the fact the ASF legal team banned this type of license as a dependency for any of their projects.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could facebook change the license at any time for future versions? I guess at least they couldn't do that retroactively for previous versions since those are already "released".

<comment><USER4> Of course. As with any project, with the agreement of all copyright holders, you can relicense at any time. Facebook has already changed the license twice.

You could, if you wanted, fork the original Apache v2 licensed version that didn't contain the PATENTS file. (Although as per the linked article, why would you want to?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I guess that's a double edged sword, right now it is harmless but who knows where FB can take it

<comment><AUTHOR> A suppose, but the point of the analysis is that one edge of the sword is pretty dull.

The point being that even in the extremely, vastly unlikely case that things would progress to an actual patent infringement suit that you lose, in the end, it may not matter, based on:

 _And even if Facebook could assert a valid patent protecting React, the damages are very speculative. I cannot find a case awarding a judgement for infringing a patent otherwise licensed through open source, but it's not a case I'd want to file. "Hey Juror #2, please award my client Facebook money because we pulled a patent license that's otherwise granted to millions of other people free of charge."_</comment></comment>


If you applied to YC this cycle, please put your email in your profile - <AUTHOR> A significant number of applicants seem to have overlooked this part of the application instructions:

    1. Please put your email address in the email field of your profile.
 If you applied this cycle, please do that, or we'll have no way to notify you later today. <comment><USER2> I'm curious, if you have a moment PG: how much does not doing something like that peeve you?

On the one hand, such detail-oriented mistakes aren't necessarily bad, especially in people who know how to notice when they miss them and it matters.

On the other hand, sometimes details can kill you: You show up 15 minutes late when it _matters_.

Does someone not including their e-mail ever push you from "go" to "no go" on an application? Why or why not?

<comment><USER3> I suspect that, by the time they check the profile for an email, they've committed enough to at least try and contact the guy some other way.

<comment><USER4> Well they probably have and automated script for rejection letters. Too many applications to do by hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Observation: this is a time sensitive post by the forum's owner/maintainer/main moderator on the original topic of the forum. Yet, he did not need to rely on a "sticky" thread or any other kind of special modifier.

<comment><USER6> "Sticky" threads are typically seen in forums where the threads are ordered by time of most recent comment. They make more sense in that context.

<comment><USER5> One may also assume they're necessary in a forum where new posts are buried less than an hour after they're posted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Will rejected applicants also receive emails?

<comment><USER7> Positive thinking dude!

<comment><USER3> Dude I'm just worried about all the other guys!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why don't you validate this in software on application time? Just put a big warning on every save and don't allow final submit.

</comment><comment><USER9> on behalf of everyone in the chat room who is incessantly asking, when should we expect notification (either way). people are consumed by this question and meaningful business/coding discussion has ceased.

<comment><USER10> See, this is where a fake notification date for the 3rd could be useful. That way when you get notified a day early on the 2nd, you are pleasantly surprised and haven't been dwelling on it all day.

<comment><AUTHOR> 10 pm is a fake notification time.

<comment><USER10> Ha! I like the cut of your jib.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> All commenters: please stop being nervous, it's rubbing off on me and I'm supposed to get some sleep tonight.

Thank you.

<comment><USER7> ahhrr it's contagious!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So who here applied?

And if you applied, what's the link to your application video?

We got a very good collection of links to ycombinator application videos going on over here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1862327>

My application was WikiTorrents.org itself: <http://wikitorrents.org/wiki/ycombinator_applicants>

</comment><comment><USER13> If my team and I did not have a email address in the email field yesterday, Nov 2nd, will we not be notified at all to being accepted or not? I updated the email field in the profile to include our email, but not til this morning, Nov 3rd.

<comment><USER14> I am in the same boat. Not sure what to make of it. Good, bad, or neither.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      (def check-usernames (u)
        (or (nil? u)
          (and
            (has-email? (user (car u)))
            (check-usernames (cdr u)))))

or something

</comment><comment><USER16> Fingers still crossed! Probably sleep with them crossed as well.</comment>


Lisp is too powerful - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.c2.com/?LispIsTooPowerful <comment><USER2> [http://wiki.c2.com/spin.gif](http://wiki.c2.com/spin.gif)

is all I see.

<comment><USER3> Same here. You have to work pretty hard fail that badly.

<comment><USER4> c2.com ("Pattern Portland Repository's Wiki" or "WikiWikiWeb") is the original Wiki and where the term "Wiki" originates. It's been running since 1995.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb)

Have some respect!

<comment><USER3> Anything can be broken by a rewrite.

<comment><USER4> It's working today; what makes you so sure it was code?

Nothing new was pushed to the public github repo yet. Last commit was a fix of misspelled "remodeling" in index.html, on Feb 20.

<comment><USER3> I merely mean that at some point in the last 20 years it went from being a simple site that displayed text, to a complex site that has to run javascript of some kind before it can display that same text.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without three actual real-world examples to point to (not even one is given) it's just an empty rant about an imaginary problem.

Computers are too powerful and general; look, one person is writing a novel, another one designing a bridge.</comment>


Is News.YC censored?  - <AUTHOR>

what happened to this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=126421
it was a stupid post but i found it hilarious <comment><USER2> I come to Hacker News to read and interact with people about start-ups and hacking related news, not to read jokes. It's not that I don't like to laugh, but there are a lot more popular sites on the web where you can be distracted and read funny stuff than there are where you can have quality discussions on a specific topic with interesting people like Hacker News.

This is rare. While community-oriented sites where you can read jokes/hilarious stuff/trolls are common and all over the place.

So when I want to be distracted, all I have to do is to open a new tab and go to reddit or whatever. HN is a special environment that must be preserved from this kind of stuff in order to keep the focused and quality discussions going on.

<comment><USER3> This is exactly my opinion too. There are so many communities that are internet link dumps that offer a ton of crap content. That was great when I had a ton of time to sit and browse through it all. But I'm growing up and trying be become a better programmer, trying to start some projects that take off, and in general no matter if I'm working at my day job or on my startup at home, trying to keep a good solid work ethic. When I need a break or I'm bored I browse HN and not only find things that interest me, but find things that help me work towards my goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We already have reddit for hilarity. As one reddit commenter put it, "don't go over to yc. it's no fun there cuz they're all serious and shit."

<comment><USER5> You're sure it wasn't "there"...?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stories get killed every day, sometimes even automatically. In fact, that's the reason for the showdead option in your profile-- so if you want to see all the spam, trolls, and offtopic submissions, you can.

<http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html>

<comment><USER7> Does YC really get much spam? As of 3/1/08 10am PDT, scrolling through the 180 visible "new" articles with showdead set to yes revealed 3 [dead] stories: the sex one mentioned in this thread, something about sharks and an acne medication one.

Come to think of it, a profile option to increase (or decrease) the effective gravity for articles posted by users who post articles marked [dead] in the last few days could be useful to monitor this.

Or even something as simple as a /dead view.

<comment><USER6> Not a huge amount. Occasionally a spammer will fill up half the new page, but most only submit a link or two at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think a lot of us came from reddit and stayed here BECAUSE we don't want those posts. Very rarely do I ever check the reddit front page anymore. I mostly stick to proggramming.reddit. Hacker news IMO should be edited to keep it going down the reddit road. Not to bash on reddit, if I want to see stupid pictures or read or post politic news thats where I go, but HN filters out a lot of noise. I'm thankful for that.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can see it, because my settings are set to see dead items.

And it isn't censorship when the code for the forum is publicly available. This is private property, not the pissing ground of trolls. You have no right to post here. You must respect the owners and curators of the site.

I would say the most important reason to kill the thread is that it isn't something you would say to someones face. That rubric works really well to judge whether it is appropriate for a forum like this, trying to host interesting content.

</comment><comment><USER9> This website is controlled by a secretive cabal of fascists plotting a coup of the Internet. As such, all dissent will be dealt with swiftly.

As we speak brown-shirted storm troopers are converging upon your apartment. You know too much. The system has turned against you. Go! Run for your life!

</comment><comment><USER10> Yes, please.

</comment><comment><USER11> No, censored is when it's reviewed before publication. Hacker News is edited however, and in some rare cases spam/troll posts are deleted, like on this occasion.

<comment><USER12> Well said. And thank god for editors.</comment></comment>


Mysteriously High Tides on East Coast Perplex Scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/hightides/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see that this event looks like it is being scientifically, and sensibly, evaluated.</comment>


Andreessen Horowitz Raises $1.5B for New Fund - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/06/10/andreessen-horowitz-new-fund/ <comment><USER2> There was a discussion on HN about a week ago on a16z and its performance[0]. Does anyone know how a16z's funds' IRRs compare to those of other top-tier VC firms (Accel, Benchmark, Greylock, Sequoia)? And are these "top-tier" firms actually providing the best returns for their LPs, or have they just created that perception?

With so few IPOs or acquisitions, how are the LPs actually getting their cash back? And how much of that money is eaten up by the "services" that a16z provides to its portfolio companies, not to mention the insane amount of content marketing they've done over the last few years (blogs, podcasts, books, etc.)?

0: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836341](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836341)

<comment><USER3> 1/3 of the raise can be used to pump cash to those who came on earlier funds.

<comment><USER4> Most fund agreements prohibit cross-fund investment, mainly because it's an incentive for fund n+1 to be used to prop up losing investments from fund n, deferring the day of reckoning.

<comment><USER3> Maybe. AH doesn't appear to roll that way.

<comment><USER4> Really? That's interesting, though not unheard of. I haven't seen their LP agreement of course.

There are actually two reasons why LPs typically don't want to agree to this. The first is that most funds focus on a specific stage (early, late etc); typically early stage funds want to invest through the entire cycle (so if firm X puts $5M into your A round they plan to put a total of, say, $20M through the liquidity event). But a later stage fund might want certain investment criteria (expansion, growth, whatever the partners come up with) and don't want it used for "familiar" deals that might not fit that thesis.

The main reason, the one I mentioned above, is propping deals up. the big driver for this is that the IRR numbers are completely made up based on judgement, which has to be the case as most of the fund will be tied up in illiquid investments. However the people making the decision is conflicted -- they are the fund GPs and of course want to look good to get new investors into their next funds. You shouldn't assume they are corrupt or malevolent: inherently they can't be dispassionate, otherwise they wouldn't be qualified to be supporting their portfolio companies through thick and thin. But this is why firms are unhappy about CALPERS releasing IRR numbers, or why Fidelity might legitimately (publicly, as they are required to) mark an investment down while the venture firm might just as legitimately consider it higher in value -- and different venture firms could even disagree.

So the poor incentive cross-fund investing provides is that a fund that is struggling, especially a zombie fund, might want to bridge some of its firms via an investment from a newer fund in the hopes that things might turn around. This incentive is even stronger during a negative macro event (i.e. a recession). An LP in the new fund doesn't want to see its good dollars following bad, it wants the money in new, promising investments.

Now if you are a big firm and can throw your weight around, or have some unicorns that everybody is clamoring to get into even at a nosebleed valuation, then you might be able to get the LPs to permit cross-fund investments. But you might not even want it (don't forget the GPs will likely be different in the different funds so their interests might not even align.

So: quite uncommon but not unheard of.

<comment><USER3> The prior information was as according to the article. Supposedly, $0.5 billion must be committed for such use (though, it may not be).

I don't think it requires corruption, or malevolence; only a source of cash, and a desire to get cash to prior investors.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I think you misunderstand the structure. They have structured the raise as two interrelated related funds. The two funds presumably invest in _the same set of portfolio companies_. I assume they structured it this way as way of reducing fees and perhaps because some LPs were interested in different levels of exposure.

      This is the same size as Andreessen Horowitz's past two funds and, like each of those efforts,
      includes a primary pool (which can do both early and late-stage deals), plus an overflow pool
      for portfolio companies that require significantly more capital.

      The breakdown this time is $1 billion for the main fund and $500 million for the parallel
      fund―the latter of which only collects management fees once capital is committed.

If this parallel fund had been able to invest in earlier funds (remember each fund is a separate company with a different set of LPs and GPs) I am sure they would have mentioned it.

<comment><USER3> That's what I thought at first, as well; until I scrolled past some advertising to, what I think is, the last sentence:

> Andreessen Horowitz's still-private portfolio companies include Airbnb, > Buzzfeed, Cyanogen, Lyft, Instacart, Jawbone, Magic Leap, Okta, Product > Hunt, Slack, and Zenefits.

If we believe the Fortune magazine, AH may have raised the side pool for any number of those companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unlike most VC firms which may be paying MPs millions in cash comp, a16z takes their management fee and plows it back into the platform (marketing, HR, research, etc). a16z's core team would never half to towel again in their life, so they don't care much about a couple hundred k here or there. They're looking for the next G/FB/TW/AirBnB/Uber.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there any evidence that VC firms are any better at predicting the future than hedge funds? I understand a few years ago that perhaps there were some inefficiencies in the startup market which could be exploited, but now that everyone focused on SV (and elsewhere) startups, is there really a reason to pay 2% of AUM for someone to make guesses on your behalf?

</comment><comment><USER7> Pretty sure Instagram was in the second fund (although they didn't actually make huge money off it).

Second fund also had Nicira ($1.2B), and possibly the Zynga and GroupOn IPOs.

Seems decent results to me.

<comment><USER8> It's interesting that Zynga and Groupon could be considered as part of a basket of "decent results". I mean, I'm sure a16z made out quite well, but both companies are worth a fraction of what they were sold to he public for. A less generous interpretation is that the early investors in these companies pulled a fast one on the public. "Getting to IPO" shouldn't be a measure of success, but that's just me.

<comment><USER9> Keep in mind that IPO investors are not John Q Public, but sophisticated Wall St. types. They knew the game on those investments - stock market musical chairs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Startups, startups everywhere!

</comment><comment><USER11> Nooooooooo! They're going to spam the economy with more startups to compete with my side project... For the next 10 years or so :(

<comment><USER12> Not sure why you get downvoted. Its true, with all this VC casino "startups", you as a hobbyist, not living in the us or be part of the bubble stand no chance.</comment></comment>


Intro to NFC Payment Relay Attacks - <AUTHOR> https://salmg.net/2018/12/01/intro-to-nfc-payment-relay-attacks/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately the article stops short of actually stating how this would be useful as you couldn't really do this in real time on an unsuspecting card holder (Hey, can I casually hold my phone over your credit card while my buddy over there buys a TV?). My best guess is that you physically control a compromised card and use the reader-emulator setup to drain the card as quickly as possible. Think of a scenario where you are holding the card at your secret hideout and then send out a team of goons, each with an emulator, to buy gift cards using the stolen card a la NFC. This just feels like a much more complicated version of card cloning.

<comment><USER3> I'm not thinking of the card as the weak point, more the reader.

a rogue employee putting a false reader that relays to the real reader.

Back when I worked in retail we had an issue in our local area where a group impersonated our support department and came on site to install altered versions of our readers.

I'd imagine things like the readers in our public transport ticketing machines are a pretty easy target too to hide a nearby relay.

In Australia our NFC limits are pretty high at ~$100, readers are nearly everywhere and the readers are sometimes display-less plastic discs.

Even the local animal shelter has a tap to make a donation thing now.

<comment><USER4> How about setting up a relay on ATM slot?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How useful is the info gathered from an attack like this? Does it depend on the specific method (e.g., contactless card versus something like Google Pay) how compromising the information is? I was under the impression that by having virtual cards and the service itself to contact, Google Pay had something of a buffer from attacks like this.

<comment><USER6> The privacy angle is only part of it - the other part is someone else spending my money, and they can do that just as easily with something like Google Pay.

<comment><USER5> Well, only if you unlock your phone, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there any other ways to prevent this? I know there's latency checks, but I assume in some cases this attack could still work.

<comment><USER8> Buy a wallet with conducting mesh (Faraday cage) or make a sleeve for your card (e.g. from an aluminium can).

Quick failure test it: by seeing if card still works on terminal when protected.

Not perfect, but would prevent most "risks".

<comment><USER9> I've carried a Datasafe wallet made by Kena Kai for ten years or so. It includes a metallic mesh next to the leather that is durable enough that the wallet is still in good shape. I have no idea how well the protection truly works (it's marketed as complying with "FIPS-201 guidelines," which might not mean a lot) but it's been an excellent wallet in its own right.

There don't seem to be _nearly_ as many of these for sale now as there were ten years ago, which is interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Secrid wallets prevent this attack, and are quite popular here in the Netherlands (where almost all bank cards are NFC enabled). Funny enough they are more popular for their form factor, than the NFC shielding that was their core feature.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are many door access control systems vulnerable to this same kind of attack. I'm currently working on open source red team tools for exploiting this.

The best way to protect yourself from these type of attacks is to have a Faraday-shielded wallet.

<comment><USER12> Why?

<comment><USER13> Because they can stop the scanners from picking them up. Some of these people buy a long range scanner made for drive up gates because you can glean the info from a block away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is why many debit systems require both the chip and the PIN. For credit cards, the situation is still scary.

<comment><USER15> NFC payment systems don't require a pin though, even if they are limited (to say £30 in the UK)

<comment><USER16> You mean by default? because here by default if the purchase is <= 20 no pin is required, but this is something my bank at least allows you to remove so you get asked the PIN always.

<comment><USER17> In the UK yeah, and I think the limit is going up. If someone uses your card fraudulently the banks have pay you back the money, and they (the banks) can get in trouble for kicking up a fuss.

<comment><USER15> There's a sweet spot between making it easy for the customer to pay (and thereby increasing the volume of sales and therefore card charges) vs. anti- fraud measures. It's the old adage of security vs. usability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The latest Yubico 5 Keys are NFC. Any thoughts on how this will affect them?</comment>


Comet: An active distributed key-value store  - <AUTHOR> http://www.systemswemake.com/papers/comet-key-value-store

<comment><USER2> What is up with this naming thing anyway? Comet is a pretty well established term... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)>

</comment><comment><USER3> The name is rather unfortunate, but the project is quite interesting. I had no idea Vuze, which used to be Azureus, had re-packaged itself as an abstracted DHT provider.

I'm disappointed the author chose to tightly couple their implementation to Vuze. What if an operator wanted to use the system on a private network of machines? Why not implement the functionality using a Kademlia library instead?

Finally, I'm extremely disappointed at the lack of openness in this paper, and indeed in all papers on Systems We Make. The lack of reproducibility in computational sciences is a current problem and I'd like to see more researchers attempt to be more open about sharing not only their code but also their setup. i.e.

<http://www.reproducibleresearch.org/>

"An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions which generated the figures." --D. Donoho

Although I agree that a research paper, if it included all the minutae required to reproduce the results on a new system, would be far to verbose, it's time researcers woke up and realised what the "scientific" part of "scientific research" means. In my mind, the bare minimum of detail would be:

\- all the source code and build environment tools on a easy-to-access repository, e.g. GitHub. \- all raw data numbers available in CSV files. \- all source code used to generate pictorial graphs as the source code to R scripts, or your favourite stats package.

This isn't rocket science. If you need more help figuring this out consider reading:

<http://reproducibleresearch.net/index.php/How_to>

</comment><comment><USER4> Naming your product after a really popular internet technique is possibly the stupidest idea I have heard in a while.

Did the author even check Comet in the programming world?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> asymptotic! One another opinion I came across recently is this - [http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/02/11/taking- scientific-...](http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/02/11/taking-scientific- publishing-to-the-next-level/)</comment>


Law enforcement to identify and store millions of voices via biometric software - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.computerworld.com/privacy/21051/law-enforcement-identify-store-millions-voices-russian-biometric-software

<comment><USER2> Makes one wonder. I can see how marketers might use that technology to recognize that you were the person who called in asking about availability of a product. If they could that would give them a way to match up voice offers over the phone with purchases in a store. I could see companies paying for a service like that.

<comment><USER3> Is this satire?

<comment><USER2> Sadly it is not. If any of your business / startup plans revolve around advertising know that the one thing that makes or breaks it are analytics. This was Google's strange gift to the world, you could advertise and know exactly how many times it was 'clicked on.' The history of advertising is filled with ways in which advertising is 'scored' so magazines have "number of subscribers" and TV shows have "number of viewers" and radio "number of listeners", the internet has "number of clicks" (or sometimes "impressions"). But the challenge is that the advertiser wants to know "How much business did I generate spending this much money?" that feedback loop which so much more precise in a digital world than in the analog world is like a heroin drip. Disruptions in the advertising space are lucrative, to swing the trough of advertising dollars away from Google and into your pocket, you need a way to provide some sort of verifiable metric of effectiveness, give the advertisers something to feed into their A/B test harnesses, the closer to 'real' it is the more you can sell it for.

Stores don't answer phones, you get pre-recorded messages of their hours and a voice menu. Perhaps you get to a human eventually but the store doesn't know if you're price shopping around or serious about coming in. They try, they do things like "We'll hold it for you but you have to come in in the next hour or so." Or "We can't guarantee that price very long will you be coming in today?" etc. They have no idea how much money they make or lose from phone support, its "unknowable" because its not technically feasible to connect a phone call to a purchase. No analytics.

So having a voice recognition system that you could use to tag potential customers and match them with actual customers would close the loop. It would give them analytics on something that was invisible to them today. They would pay your company to give them that capability because they would use it to increase sales far more than they paid you for the system.

I just thought another way they could use it is to 'tag' people at the store and then when you called in if you were a known customer it might put you right to a real person. You would see a more positive experience, they would invest in that experience because they already know you are a customer.

There is money on that table. I assure you that someone will reach out and pick it up.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: See what happens when you translate a phrase through 20 languages - <AUTHOR>

I made this "Translation Telephone" game as a demo for a Google APIs talk a few months ago, and people seemed to get a kick out of it, so I've fixed it up with a backend, share-ability, and statistics: http://www.translation-telephone.com/
Try it out, you can get some amusing results.
Let me know if you have spot bugs or have any feedback. Thanks! <comment><USER2> You should run the phrase through Chinese more often. Google Translate is horrendous with that language. I just had two Taiwanese exchange students over at my house for a few weeks, and they had a game of watching Google return garbage even with simple phrases.

In particular, "I am happy" gives back "I'm happy" in every case -- except when Chinese is part of the loop. Then, it translates to "I'm very happy."

Nice web app, though. It reminds me of Translation Party, which went viral on Reddit a while ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> Trying out the classics ...

<http://www.translation-telephone.com/#7014>

"Out of sight, out of mind" -> "In addition to the heart."

<http://www.translation-telephone.com/#3012>

"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." -> "But, as the flying flesh is weak."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.translation-telephone.com/>

Also check out recent phrases: <http://www.translation-telephone.com/recent>

</comment><comment><USER4> "I love you." is idempotent. <3</comment>


Fibonacci Web Design: Making web pages using harmonic proportion and Fibonacci numbers - <AUTHOR> http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/fibonacciwebdesign.html

<comment><USER2> Does it really matter what sequence of numbers you use, when the result isn't even viewable in a modern browser (Firefox 3 on OSX)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using the same browser/OS and see it fine.</comment></comment>


Marc Andreessen on "Series Seed Documents" and Why VCs Should Start Using Them - <AUTHOR> http://www.pehub.com/64825/marc-andreessen-on-series-seed-documents-and-why-vcs-should-start-using-them/ <comment><USER2> This is great stuff, and is an example of how its the relationship that is ultimately the most important for the attorneys.

I wish they took this to the next step and provided similar documents or template for incorporation for your typical small tech startup. While legal zoom and other cheap services can get you there, I am reminded of PG's interview on Mixergy, and how he remarked about YC companies bringing in their "broken" LLC's. Perhaps if there was a better template for startups to use (both LLC and s-corp), these companies could be better positioned when they get to the angel investor or vc stage.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would be curious what pg thinks of these documents.

<comment><USER4> I haven't seen them, but I applaud the idea. The Series AA documents we and WSGR produced have been used by many startups and have saved them a great deal of time and trouble.

<http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa.html>

The Series AA documents are intended for angel rounds, whereas it sounds like the Series Seed documents, despite the name, are intended to be used with VCs. It could be harder to talk VCs into using standardized documents, but it would be great if that happened.

<comment><USER5> Nope. the new docs are for angel rounds. Horowitz makes the point that VC's should act like angels when in an angel round (when in rome).

I anticipate that both docs (YC + Andreessen/Horowitz are very similar. They keep it simple so that shit doesnt get complicated if you make it to an A round.

What's great is that lots of top notch folks have pledged to use them = a standard is upon us.

<comment><USER4> Well, we know standard docs work in that situation. I hope once the Series Seed docs are out, someone will publish an analysis of the diffs between them and the Series AA docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> i really applaud this type of approach. and i do think it's completely appropriate given the ratio between legal fees and the money changing hands in smaller rounds.

i do wonder how well this will play out globally. the world is increasingly global, and a lot of companies end up taking rounds from investors in multiple countries as they expand and enter new markets.</comment>


Is Food the New Sex? (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hoover.org/research/food-new-sex <comment><USER2> Sometimes I want to explain to someone what "begging the question" means in its original definition as a conclusion that relies on itself as a premise. I've often wished there was a perfect example of question-begging I could point to as a demonstration. Well, now I have one.

The most important - really, the only - point that this waffling diatribe offers is that food and sex are moral equivalents. Except it doesn't ever prove that point. Rather, it sort of wafts it in the air ("is food the new sex?"), assumes they are connected ("The question before us today is not whether the two appetites are closely connected") then throws out random just- so assertions ("Both [...] can prove ruinous not only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself")

The next thousand lines of condescending feigned surprise basically amount to "oh, how strange it is that although sex and food are very similar, we treat them differently". Yes, that would be surprising if they were very similar. But what if they're not very similar and you just made that up because it would be convenient for your worldview?

When your conclusion is your premise, anything is possible. I present here my new essay: Is Sex the New Eugenics? Sex and eugenics are inextricably linked. At various times laws have been made and wars have been fought over both sex and eugenics. We previously thought eugenics was a good idea but we now see it as morally bankrupt. We previously thought sex was morally bankrupt but we now see it as a good idea. But since they're the same, that's wrong. Sex and Eugenics are the same. Nietzsche.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was the craziest title, until I read the entire essay. And now I think the author has made a very deep analysis of modern society. It's almost as if there is a conservation law for conservative ideas. Sex isn't doing it anymore, so we are switching to food where we impose moral judgements on others who are "doing it wrong".

<comment><USER3> I found it difficult to read the entire essay, so I didn't. I had problems with a lot of the characterizations.

To start, "What happens when, for the first time in history, adult human beings are free to have all the sex and food they want?"

This is only true for a subset of the people, but it's always been true for a subset of the people. When I read about the nobility of the 1600s, I see that there was a whole lot of sex going on, and surely they had enough food for themselves.

The 1960s/1970s era of free love, after the pill and before HIV/AIDS and drug resistant venereal diseases was also, I think, more free than now. The author writes that HIV/AIDS is "manageable", for those with access to good medical care, but doesn't dismiss the point that it's not true that adults now are freer in their ways than (again, a subpopulation of) adults in the 1960s.

"let us imagine some broad features of the world seen through two different sets of eyes: a hypothetical 30-year-old housewife from 1958 named Betty, and her hypothetical granddaughter Jennifer, of the same age, today."

Home deep freezers weren't really available until after the Second World War, so that description of a 1958 era is one of food plenty, not food deficit, and that description is only true for a couple of decades.

"If there is anything "fresh" on the plate, it is likely a potato."

That's just not true. I've seen the pictures of the farmers in the late 1800s/early 1900s coming into town with their produce on wagons. There's more than just potatoes during the growing season.

For a real-world example, see [http://www.foodtimeline.org/fooddecades.html](http://www.foodtimeline.org/fooddecades.html) , and quoting from Barbara Hubbard, Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1956: "This is a treat for them, especially when they are served hamburgers, fruit salad, carrot sticks, and an ice cream bar for dessert. They consider this menu a real party and what could be easier for Mother. When the children finish their supper they usually go upstairs to watch Daddy shave and tell him about their day. Then he reads them a story and tucks them into bed. This gives me time to broil a steak, mix the green salad, and dress the baked potatoes with sour cream and chives."

So, the children have fruit salad and carrot sticks, and in addition to potato, the adults have a green salad.

On the same link, a menu from Family Circle, August 1957, includes corn, salad, and honeydew melon, and from Women's Day 1959 has tomatoes, vegetable salad, and a fruit basket. Both have more than just potatoes.

"Wavering in and out of vegetarianism"

As was recently pointed out to me, C.S. Lewis in "Voyage of the Dawn Treader", written in the 1950s, ridicules vegetarianism as being faddish.

It's easy to believe that the author created examples specifically to illustrate a point, rather than to describe real cultural trends.

What I see, when I look at the same events, is a move away from a conformist culture to a diverse culture. The moral strictures of church, class, race, gender, etc. are less binding.

Remember too the author writes for the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. As such, works from them are more likely to be aligned with conservative views, and not, say, rail against patriarchy.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would have helped if you read the entire essay. I was a kid during that 1958 description, and it is exactly what was happening in my house (Alexandria, VA). My mom wasn't shopping at farmers markets. And now no one particularly cares how much sex you have in the privacy of your home, but "food woo" is rampant, and if you are feeding your kids gluten, well, you are just a bad parent.

At the moment my father is having chronic bowel issues, so my sisters are urging "probiotics", a term coined in 1907 (patent medicine era) that has little or no actual proof of efficacy, but that doesn't stop marketers from acting like it's critical to health. The doctor is not wrong if he doesn't bring up probiotics, just like he's not wrong for not bringing up alternative medicine.

>This is only true for a subset of the people, but it's always been true for a subset of the people. When I read about the nobility of the 1600s, I see that there was a whole lot of sex going on, and surely they had enough food for themselves.

No, the _freedom_ to have all the sex you want is new, for pretty much everyone in the US. Not everyone takes advantage of it, but there is little or no limit on your private sexual behavior now. Just consider gay marriage. And there was a huge risk with private sexual behavior back then.

Part of the "food woo" is the curse of capitalism, the infinite and never ending expansion of choice in the marketplace. With all those new food variations, it's important to convince people that they are eating wrong. That it is becoming a moral choice is just icing on the cake for marketers.

<comment><USER3> Like I said, I couldn't get through the essay because I fundamentally disagreed with it.

You say your memories of the 1950s are in agreement with it. I point out multiple examples from that era which show it isn't the case. I trust copies of literature from that era better than I do memories of childhood. I know how distorted my own memories of childhood were compared to the reality of the 1970s.

Here's another: [http://calorielab.com/news/2005/08/25/family-dinners- school-...](http://calorielab.com/news/2005/08/25/family-dinners-school- lunches-and-fast-food-in-the-1950s/) \- "Dinners consisted of meat, potatoes, a green vegetable, dinner rolls, salad. and dessert." Or look at the image of a Swanson's TV dinner from the 1950s , [http://leitesculinaria.com/10348/writings-dining-through- the...](http://leitesculinaria.com/10348/writings-dining-through-the-decades- american-food-history.html) , with potato and peas.

You say your mom wasn't shopping at a farmer's market. I never mentioned that - my reference was to 50 years previous. Fruit and vegetables are available at the supermarket. Here are pictures of a 1950s supermarket. [http://fl4projects.tumblr.com/post/16150521363](http://fl4projects.tumblr.com/post/16150521363) . See the produce section? Same for [http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27021666487620537/](http://www.pinterest.com/pin/27021666487620537/) .

You say that "food woo" is rampant now. I pointed out that C.S. Lewis against vegetarianism of the 1950s. Or I can point you to [http://articles.latimes.com/1999/may/12/food/fo-36243](http://articles.latimes.com/1999/may/12/food/fo-36243) and how "From the 1930s through the '60s, Americans were convinced you had to have a certain kind of bowl to make a proper green salad: a plain, unvarnished wooden bowl which could never be washed." Or I could point out the radium craze of the early 1900s, when it seems you could get just about anything with a bit of radium added to it, for good health.

Here's a better description of my point, at [http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article10.htm](http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/articles/article10.htm) :

> Why do so many people think American families are facing worse problems now > than in the past? Partly it's because we compare the complex and diverse > families of the 1900s with the seemingly more standard-issue ones of the > 1950s, a unique decade when every long-term trend of the 20th century was > temporarily reversed. In the 1950s, for the first time in 100 years, the > divorce rate fell while marriage and fertility rates soared, creating a boom > in nuclear-family living. The percentage of foreign-born individuals in the > country decreased. And the debates over social and cultural issues that had > divided Americans for 150 years were silenced, suggesting a national > consensus on family values and norms. ...

> But much nostalgia for the 1950s is a result of selective amnesia-the same > process that makes childhood memories of summer vacations grow sunnier with > each passing year. The superficial sameness Of 1950s family life was > achieved through censorship, coercion and discrimination. People with > unconventional beliefs faced governmental investigation and arbitrary > firings. African Americans and Mexican Americans were prevented from voting > in some states by literacy tests that were not administered to whites. > Individuals who didn't follow the rigid gender and sexual rules of the day > were ostracized.

The 1950s also had the "curse of capitalism". All of the new processed food companies want to get in on the action, after the rationing of the war. Look at [http://thehairpin.com/2013/10/lets-eat-some-weird- shi](http://thehairpin.com/2013/10/lets-eat-some-weird-shi) and see just how many ways the free market was trying to convince people in the 1950s to add a bit of their branded processed food to a recipe. "Fill the center of the peaches with Miracle Whip." "Split frankfurter buns in half and spread with Kraft Mayonnaise. Fill with good thick strips of Velveeta and brush the tops of the buns with melted butter or Parkay Margarine.", etc.

I don't see any awareness of these issues in that essay, which makes it very frustrating to read. It comes across like a specific, typically conservative viewpoint which emphasizes a certain hierarchical conformist culture.

<comment><USER4> I didn't get all the way through your post because I fundamentally disagreed with it.

> _I trust copies of literature from that era better than I do memories of > childhood._

You're doing it wrong! :)

Really. "Literature" that specifies what people should eat is likely pulp (a class of literature). You can't gain any information about my diet--or even the average diet--by flipping through the magazine racks at the grocery store checkout--not in this decade or decades past.

<comment><USER3> I have an autobiographical essay by someone written in around 2001. It says X about something that happened in the 1960s. I have a paper written by the same person in 1964. It says not X.

That's evidence that people's memory fades or changes over time. Of course that's well known. For example, "Not only are our memories faulty (anyone who has uncovered old diaries knows that), but more importantly Schiller says our memories change each time they are recalled. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by.", from [http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i- right/201307/your-m...](http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/am-i- right/201307/your-memory-isnt-what-you-think-it-is) .

I have printed menu suggestions, restaurant menus, and pictures and movies from the 1950s which say that "meat and two veg" was far more common than just potatoes.

Certainly it's not indicative of anyone's specific diet. Certainly it may be true for the OP's history. But if the only "fresh" vegetable on a typical dinner was potato, why are there so many non-potatoes vegetables in those pictures of 1950s grocery stores?

Recall too that the original essay discusses a hypothetical diet of the 1950s, and a comparison to a hypothetical one now. There are not that many vegetarians now for the modern example to be representative of a general modern trend, and I pointed out that vegetarianism was also part of general culture of the 1950s. The essay is therefore an artificially constructed and I argue essentially meaningless comparison.

Here's a perhaps atypical diary entry from 1954 for a farewell dinner, [http://annbkennedy.blogspot.se/2013/04/june-29-30-1954-farew...](http://annbkennedy.blogspot.se/2013/04/june-29-30-1954-farewell- dinner.html):

> Long menu in courses--celery, etc., soup, then small lobsters with rice, > filet mignon, gr. beans, mushrooms, then asparagus salad, peach melba, > coffee & fruit.

That's yet another piece of evidence that says that many people ate dinner with fresh vegetables other than potato.

(To be fair, in winter it would be hard to get fresh veg. But the essay is using fresh veg as a proxy for food surplus, and it's better to look at food surplus directly. Otherwise it makes no sense to say that King Louis XIV of France, deprived of fresh peas in winter, is somehow food impoverished.)

<comment><USER4> You can't tell a person older than you that they are wrong about their own life during a period that happened before you were born. _Especially not with with pulp sources._

This is not an internet points game and it is not wikipedia. This is a conversation between more or less like-minded people. Personal insight is to be _valued_.

If you want to actually prove your point, get the 1950/1960 US Census data, average them, analyze the income and employment numbers, and tell me how the center of the bell curve could afford a three course meal on the daily. Don't forget that 36% of the country wasn't employed at all (in 1950, includes children), but still needed to eat (includes children!).

In short, yes, you can trump personal memory with hard numbers (and you should!)--but not with a mere large volume of citations.

<comment><USER3> What you ask, regarding the analysis of census data, is completely besides the point because it doesn't even fit the example in the essay.

You make a statement about the bell curve. Jennifer, the modern vegetarian, is not in the bell curve.

[http://www.vegetariantimes.com/article/vegetarianism-in- amer...](http://www.vegetariantimes.com/article/vegetarianism-in-america/) suggests that 10 percent of U.S., adults, or 22.8 million people, say they largely follow a vegetarian-inclined diet.

Even if it's 20%, that's still not near the center of the modern US diet. So already the essay isn't a strong match to modern culture.

I sure can say that someone is wrong about their memory, but in this case I'm saying that the OP's recollections don't fit the data. Even if true for the OP, it appears to be atypical.

You complain that I mention pulp sources. I've also mentioned diary entries. Every single entry is a "personal insight."

See [http://diaries.markbartlett.net/diary58.html](http://diaries.markbartlett.net/diary58.html) for another example. "We had fried chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, date nut bread and coffee for dinner." and "Mrs. Colburn gave us sack of green beans and Mrs. Burnett more green beans, onions and beets." (Some of that would have been canned, but some certainly eaten fresh.) "Mr. and Mrs. Kluckman and baby here tonight – brought green beans and cabbage."

Or [http://melissa-ellison.tripod.com/id25.html](http://melissa- ellison.tripod.com/id25.html) from 1933, "July 9 We were all alone today. No one came. Very warm. We had string beans for dinner today." (They picked and canned the string beans the day before, so these were fresh beans.) "Sept 26 Very warm and sultry. We are again to have boiled bacon and swisschard for dinner today." "Nov 14 Cloudy and snowflurries. We had spare ribs and carrotts cooked together for dinner."

[https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/Diary%201951.%20America.ht...](https://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/Diary%201951.%20America.html) which is about a British man visiting the US in 1951: "For dinner I had fruit and soup and bread and broccoli & 2 huge lamb chops & Pepsi Cola & chocolate cake & milk.", "We had a fine lunch of meat, potatoes, vegetables, apple juice, raspberries & ice-cream." (It's entirely possible that the vegetables were canned or frozen. At some point though I don't think it makes a difference. Most of my vegetables now are frozen too.)

I'll make my point again. The author of the essay sets up a hypothetical "Betty" from 1958 in a situation which does not appear to be characteristic of the larger society. The OP - the one who linked to the essay - finds the description to be characteristic of the OP's own history. That doesn't mean that that OP's memory is a true reflection of the time.

You want me, I believe, to demonstrate somehow that the OP must not be correct. I am trying instead to show that the hypothetical Betty is likely not characteristic of the era, and given the well-known problems with human memory, I want something stronger than a childhood memory when the available "pulp" evidence so strongly shows a much wider variety of food dishes for that era.

This was absolutely the era before the War on Poverty, and before the Civil Rights era. The essay seems to exclude immigrant foods (fresh bok choi for Chinese dishes), regional foods (like Southern dishes with collard greens), etc. That's why I argue that it isn't representative of the 1950s, but only representative perhaps of the most culturally influential social groups of that era .. and the OP may also be a member of that group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These issues are simpler to explain than the author realizes--and without any special invocation of Kant. Simply put, technology has made sex _a lot safer_ at the same time as it has made food _a lot more dangerous_. Sex is safer (in the sense of creating fewer risks and uncertainties), as we all know, thanks to developments like condoms, STD testing, contraception, and legalized abortion. Meanwhile, food is a lot more dangerous, thanks to food science being used to create "hyperpalatable" junk food--cf. Paul Graham's "The Acceleration of Addictiveness."[1] As a 20-something in the U.S., I look around me and see obesity as an almost guaranteed outcome once people reach a certain age (with diabetes and heart disease not far behind)--and like many of my peers, I'm spooked.

In response to this, I wouldn't exactly say people have made healthy eating into a new Categorical Imperative. Instead, they've become paranoid and superstitious about what it is in modern food that's hurting them. Hence we get ridiculous cargo cults like gluten-free, organic, anti-GMO, everything Dr. Oz pushes, etc. Meanwhile, evidence-based approaches to the issue have not yet produced a diet that is optimal, practical, and that provides the level of enjoyment that we're used to from food. I personally think that Soylent is off to a promising start, although it has a long way to go.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html)

<comment><USER6> > made food a lot more dangerous

You are almost certainly too young to remember it in the United States, but it wasn't that long ago that food was terribly dangerous. Start at non-sterile meat, bad canning practices (botulism killed 2,000+ per year in the United States until around WWII, down to a handful today) and go all the way to pellagra (an easily-solved Vitamin B deficiency that still killed 7500 people per year in the US in the 1930s; effectively 0 today).

Remember Wonder Bread? It seems like evil simple carbs today, but it was initially popular precisely because the color and texture proved that it wasn't adulterated like many local bakers did at the time (flour was expensive, sawdust was cheap and could stretch meager supplies).

Food was not safe for a long time.

<comment><USER7> Let's put those numbers in perspective, though. The CDC [1] claims that 600,000 people die per year due to heart disease, most of the causes of which (again according to the CDC) are people's choices in food and drink. That's pretty good evidence that food, on the whole, is not safer now.

1\. [http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm)

<comment><USER8> Seems to be an interesting difficult in terms of whether the dangers in food are ones that people consuming it can expect to perceive. In an era when food poisoning was more common, maybe a lot of people knew quickly whether the food they ate had harmed them; now folks eating junk food might have to wait years to experience some of the adverse effects, and can't really relate those effects to a particular purchase or product or vendor.

I worry about a similar thing for computer security. A lot of the threats that we used to think about in terms of, say, viruses, wanted to get the user's _attention_ either through innocuous mischief, or by showing off with spectacularly destructive behavior, like deleting files or crashing the machine or even erasing the hard drive. "Look at me, I infected your computer!" And later we saw adware which tries to get the user's attention for marketing purposes (which is definitely still a thing).

But now a whole lot of attackers have a goal of long-term, pervasive, convert compromise, to be used selectively later on -- botnets for DDoS attacks and spam, keyloggers for delayed financial fraud or government surveillance, "advanced persistent threats" to compromise infrastructure, maybe in service of transitively compromising other infrastructure.

[http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Docum...](http://www.isaca.org/chapters2/Norway/NordicConference/Documents/14.pdf)

So in the past there was a common expectation that a virus would do something that the user could notice, or else what's the point? Whereas nowadays if someone says "the government is spying on me, my computer displayed a weird security warning message" it tends to _reduce_ the credibility of the claim, because we expect that botnet developers and government hackers are as covert as possible, delaying the moment when victims of compromise would notice anything's wrong for as far as possible, trying to break or obfuscate the link between the attack and its results as much as possible.

So in one sense computers have also gotten more dangerous because there are more powerful and pervasive attackers, but in another sense there may be a trend _away_ from risks of getting any kind of malware whose effects you will notice any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much of this is more easily explained in that Betty is conservative and her granddaughter Jennifer is liberal?

Jonathan Haidt's TED talk on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives touches on sex and food (see time index 7:09): [http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind](http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind)

If there is a shift in the decades in common cultural attitudes, it might be explained by a general pendulum swing back and forth between conservative attitudes versus liberal attitudes holding more common sway in any particular decade.

<comment><USER10> My family is conservative and holds more traditional views about sex, family, and religion than most, yet is caught up in the obsession with healthy eating just as much as its liberal counterparts. That's what makes this interesting from my perspective: attitudes about food have changed dramatically across social boundaries and political boundaries, to a greater degree than even our attitudes about sex.

You don't have to agree with the author's conclusions (I mostly don't) to be interested in the way food is being treated in recent years as simultaneously a status symbol and the object of moral and political dogma.

<comment><USER3> Food has often been treated that as a status symbol. Being overweight was historically an indication of wealth. The poor could not afford much food, and were sometimes prohibited from certain foods.

Caligula famously threw a banquet once consisting of thousands of flamingo tongues, camel heels, and roast ostrich. Quoting from [http://archive.archaeology.org/0111/abstracts/romans.html](http://archive.archaeology.org/0111/abstracts/romans.html) :

> Eating well was not just a daily ritual, it was a philosophy and a way of > life in Imperial Rome. Your reputation and acceptance in the upper echelons > of society was often determined by your abilities as a generous host and as > a connoisseur.

"Healthy eating", as the essay observes, has a long history in the US. Kellogg started the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the 1860s. Quoting from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Creek_Sanitarium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Creek_Sanitarium), Kellogg "encouraged a low-fat, low-protein diet with an emphasis on whole grains, fiber-rich foods, and most importantly, nuts. Kellogg also recommended a daily intake of fresh air, exercise, and the importance of hygiene. Many of the theories of John Harvey Kellogg were later published in his book The Road to Wellness."

> Battle Creek utilised information as known at that time to provide > nutritional requirements for health and well-being relative to each person's > requirements. Food required careful prescriptive preparation, with care also > taken to ensure appetiveness and palatability were recognised. The diet > lists included "scores of special dishes and hundreds of special food > preparations, each of which has been carefully studied in relation to its > nutritive and therapeutic properties", with the diet lists used "by the > physicians in arranging the diet prescriptions of individual patients".

You may know Kellogg better as the producer of corn flakes.

Diet was also used as social distinction. As a clear example, Italian Americans brought with them a love of garlic, which wasn't popular in the US. A xenophobic slur was to call someone of Italian food heritage a "garlic eater." See [http://www.billszone.com/fanzone/archive/index.php/t-224620....](http://www.billszone.com/fanzone/archive/index.php/t-224620.html) for an example:

> In 1960 "we had become truly one nation and one people"?!?!? Really??? You > want to tell that to the millions of blacks under Jim Crow laws...government > sanctioned institutional RACISM. Holy Jesus! Pat has now lost any semblance > of that honesty I gave him.

> Then he distorts history, leaving out the rank "racism" that the > Irish...German...Italians...Poles...Jews and "other Eastern Europeans" > suffered when they came to this country. My God...I felt first hand the > prejudice and rank hatred directed toward Italians we'll into the 80's. Most > notably, by the father of a woman I was seeing. He was a WASP, and he left > no doubt that my Italian heritage made me a low life. He derisively called > me "garlic eater" and let it be known that his daughter was too good for a > Dago like me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We know what happens when humans are free to have all the food we want. They get fat. Next question.

The food guilt thing is a product of marketing. Visit a Whole Foods and look at the displays.

Sex guilt is back. (For straight people only.) It's not clear why. In the US, it's not due to religion; the religious right peaked in the last century. There are whole new areas of guilt since the 1980s, from sexual harassment to an expanded definition of rape. Not only are abortions harder to get, even birth control pills are harder to get. Women's clothing is more conservative, too.

<comment><USER12> "We know what happens when humans are free to have all the food we want. They get fat. Next question".

I'm not so sure about that, not all societies that can "have all the food" they want are fat, for example France.

<comment><USER13> Obesity rates are way up in France over the last 10 years too, though. They've doubled.

<comment><USER14> Has food become more available in the past decade? Or perhaps France is getting more factory-food on the shelves? Ten years ago I didn't notice that people were going hungry.

<comment><USER10> It might be tied to the increased rates of immigration many European countries have seen in recent years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Employment conditions are scary, marriage seems to have stabilized at a much lower equilibrium, housing is no longer the bastion of security it once was, etc. I look around at my peers and I see people who don't feel that they are in control of their lives. This winds up going one of two ways. Either food is seen as one last unadulterated pleasure and abused, or tightly regimented as one last bastion of control. I think the health food sector is growing because it gives people a sense of autonomy, when that feeling is in short supply.

</comment><comment><USER16> A lot of this rests on an examination of two characters who ostensibly represent their respective eras, but I am really not sure the analysis of these two people holds up to much scrutiny.

On what basis do we claim that Jennifer thinks sex is "de gustibus", for example? I suspect it is more likely that both would hold similar reservations, just regarding different circumstances. For example, they both may think some sexual activity is wrong but just disagree on which in particular.

Maybe Betty thinks gay sex is wrong and Jennifer doesn't, but they would both agree that a person leaving their family behind to "run off" with a new and exciting partner. In fact the suggestion otherwise strikes me as veiled grumbling about "millennials".

<comment><USER17> I don't think the distinction here is extrapolated at all.

Try explaining something like Tinder to someone born in the first half of the previous century, and how most urban single 20-somethings use it everyday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Betteridge's law of headlines applies very well here. The entire article is basically a philosophical ramble. I also think it's funny to remove the word 'New' from the title [only in part due to this being penned in 2009]

</comment><comment><USER19> I find this whole article rather suspect. For example, people have always had premarital sex. ([http://books.google.com/books?id=knN9HzkY1pEC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA...](http://books.google.com/books?id=knN9HzkY1pEC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=premarital+pregnancy+rates+america+nineteenth+century&source=bl&ots=33AKmshrTb&sig=ae- VOz3pg4fbFvzq1Be0TrxtZ-s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Y1xuVMb2D5GuogSh0YHgDw&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=premarital%20pregnancy%20rates%20america%20nineteenth%20century&f=false))

And the author simply asserts, without any proof, that children from divorced families do worse. Really? [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is- divorce-bad-for...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-divorce-bad- for-children/)

I stopped reading halfway through on the assumption that the author was a Republican, and lo and behold, she's with the Hoover Institute. Thought- provoking article, but given the assumptions made and how they clash with the facts as I know them, I don't buy any of it.

<comment><USER10> >I stopped reading halfway through on the assumption that the author was a Republican

I am impressed by the open-mindedness you display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't agree with the first paragraph, that social mores exist to limit the danger of uninhibited indulgence in sex. I think most if not all (other than disease) downsides of sexual indulgence are because it violates customs. The author has that completely backwards.

<comment><USER21> So you think "customs" are totally arbitrary? Not following the logic.

<comment><USER22> No, they're mostly designed to keep a few Italian men in white hats in charge of 16th century Europe. We should probably take a long hard look at them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I only skimmed the article, but I guess the link between food and sex was also shown in a Southpark episode:

[http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s14e14-creme- fraiche](http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s14e14-creme-fraiche)

</comment><comment><USER24> > She also buys "organic" in the belief that it is better both for her and for > the animals raised in that way, even though the products are markedly more > expensive than those from the local grocery store.

Is anyone really eating organic food because of a perceived health benefit anymore? Everyone I know who eats organic (myself included) is doing for the sake of environmental consciousness or animal welfare not personal health.

<comment><USER24> If you feel the need to downvote this, I think an explanation is in order... Perhaps your answer to my question is "Yes, I do eat organic food because of a perceived health benefit." If that's the case, a response would be more appropriate...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mods: could use a (2009) tag.

<comment><USER26> How could we have missed that very large year? Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I call bullshit. I've gone much longer without sex than without food.</comment>


Are Google, Yahoo the next dinosaurs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2008-06-09-mobile-search_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

<comment><USER2> I immediately stopped reading this article when they referred to Google and Yahoo! as "desktop brands", and completely reaffirmed my stance that major news outlets do a HORRIBLE job of reporting on Technology aside from a few stand out columnists.</comment>


Accused of Spying, Kaspersky Lab Will Show Its Code and Operations to Outsiders - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2017/10/23/accused-of-spying-russian-security-firm-will-show-its-code-and-operations-to-outsiders/ <comment><AUTHOR> Original title: _Accused of Spying, Russian Security Firm Will Show Its Code and Operations to Outsiders_

Techmeme summary: _Kim Zetter / The Intercept: Kaspersky offers source code and business operations for review by independent third parties after Russian spying claims_</comment>


Less Medicine, More Health - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/there-is-such-a-thing-as-too-much-medical-care/ <comment><AUTHOR> YouTube video where the author of the text covers the same idea: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8KoqciAtlQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8KoqciAtlQ)</comment>


Whole Earth Catalog Fall 1968 - Electronic Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1010 <comment><USER2> Another rubbish scribd link and there's no way to liberate the PDF without paying.

Here's an useful link to a PDF preview: [http://www.wholeearth.com/uploads/2/File/documents/sample- eb...](http://www.wholeearth.com/uploads/2/File/documents/sample-ebook.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> "We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG."

The Whole Earth Catalog changed a huge number of lives, mine included.</comment>